Quoting in full a lengthy Facebook post by a recent graduate of Oberlin College on the subject of anti-Israel sentiment on campus, David Bernstein examines the fruit of the far-left’s venomous demonization of the Jewish state:

I found most remarkable [this Oberlin alumna’s] assertion that multiple students had dismissively referred to the Holocaust as “white-on-white crime,” as if the “progressive” students there found it impossible to conceive of horrific racist violence outside the parameters of paradigmatic examples of racist violence in the United States. What’s remarkable about the incidents she recounts, which range from gross insensitivity to blatant anti-Semitism, is . . . that, if the Facebook post in question is true, some of the most purportedly progressive students, those who [claim to be] most acutely sensitive to and active against other forms of racism, ignore anti-Semitism, belittle it, and in some cases participate in it.

I found the entire post of great interest, not just as a troubling sign of emerging hostility to Jews and Jewish concerns among self-proclaimed social-justice advocates on left-wing campuses, but as an equally troubling sign of the degradation of intellectual discourse at such campuses more generally, as reason, compassion, and plain old decent manners are replaced with shrill sloganeering based on which group can most successfully proclaim itself to be a victim.

Nor is there any indication, despite the purported focus on multiculturalism, that the students who engage in these antics have received anything resembling a sound education in world history and cultures, or much of anything else, as everything is shoehorned into simplistic ideological categories that bear no apparent relation to context and reality.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.